KDE Connect – New stuff 0x3

Today we released version 1.10 of the KDE Connect Android app. Therefore it’s time again to share what we’ve been working on.

Targeting Android Oreo

As of this month app updates uploaded to Google Play need to target Android 8. This has several implications. Targeting Oreo comes with an updated Support Library, which forces us to drop support for Android 4.0 and below. According to our Google Play data this will affect approximately 400 users. We are very sorry about that, but these users won’t receive further updates. Furthermore, Android Oreo introduced some restrictions in regard to apps running in the background. In the future in order to be able to run in the background KDE Connect needs to show a persistent notification. The good news is that you can hide the notification. The (slightly) bad news is that we cannot do it by default. To hide the notification you need to long-press it and switch it off. Other notifications from KDE Connect are unaffected by this.

1.10 Changes

These are the main changes of version 1.10. Not mentioned are countless small improvements and under-the-hood changes.

Mouse input now works with the same speed independent from the phones pixel density.

Several settings scatterd across the UI have been bundled into a single settings screen.

A lot of work has gone into how we handle SMS on the Android side in preparation for something huge. Stay tuned 😉

Other changes

The desktop side has improved as well since my last post.

The windows build of KDE Connect gained support for keyboard input.

The plasmoid gained a couple of additions. In my last update I mentioned that it is possible to run commands from there. It is now also possible to lauch the command setup from there. Furthermore it is now possible to select files to share them from there.

The Linux Mobile App gained many visual improvements and features. It now supports sharing files and controlling the system volume.

If you are using Itinerary you can send booking information from the PC directly to the phone via KDE Connect.

It is now possible to send files directly from Pantheon Files (and other Elementary apps) and Thunar via KDE Connect.

Again, there are countless other improvements that I did not explicitly mention.

Hopefully SMS handling on desktop side is improved and notifications as well.
I’d be awesome to have some small program for desktop that will store sms and allow you to easily answer. At this point i can answer only if i clicked in time otherwise i can only see it in the notification area but not answer.
Notifications are cleared at some point.

Have you actually tried this? It doesn’t work unless you root your phone (known issue) due to dropping connections. This might be interesting for a fun side project, but should be shipped as part of an actual operating system.

May I ask who was behind that idea/implementation? Is there is a standard way of supporting such file managers or do you have to spend time & effort on each file managers? Where can I support these amazing efforts?

I added the integration bases on the integration from https://github.com/Bajoja/indicator-kdeconnect. I don’t think there is a standard way. For this case it was sufficient to install one file each.
If you can’t support us by contributing code you can donate to KDE (https://www.kde.org/donations). These donations help us gather together once in a while and work on KDE Connect together

Just checked out the codebase. Do all these files under (indicator-kdeconnect/data/extensions/) get installed in specific directories at install time? stays in application dir? Just wondering about the Linux Desktop ecosystem and standards.

One last personal question. Why do you all do this. I use Linux full time with [KDE these days] and always wanted to ask why do people devote time and effort to build these useful applications. I know the kernel is funded by big corps, Gnome is kinda funded by Redhat. But why independent awesome people like yourself spend time on things like this? Commitment to do good? Giving back? have free time?

Answering is totally optional 😊

Well I should probably leave you now. Thanks for being helpful and generous with your time 😍

I love KDE Connect and excessively use it in my day-to-day workflow, but actually, KDE Connect on KDE was one of the reasons that drove me away from KDE/Plasma again as my primary working desktop. KDE Connect is a wonderful tool but the desktop side of it could see *way* more love especially compared to gsconnect under GNOME (https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/), talking about things such as the ability to send SMS from the desktop or have all the device interactions available in one single place. 😉

Ever since the app got updated I can no longer browse files on my phone using KDE Connect (on Ubuntu 16.04.5 and Kubuntu 18.04.1). If I double click on any of the phone directory in my file manager it just complains about the (directory) file not being found. I don’t think KDE connect has actually been updated on the PC side for my distros. Can you guys look into this?

In the future, could you please give the translators a heads up by e-mailing the kde-i18n-doc mailing list before releasing a new version? Then we (the translators) can make sure that the translations are complete.
There are hundreds of KDE applications, and most translation teams can’t manage to have every single one of them completely translated each and every day. But if there is a string freeze and we are given notification some time (at least a week, preferably two weeks) before the release, we can prioritise to update the translations for your software, so that they are complete and proofread when your release.

Sounds great. I am especially looking forward to the command integration. All this time I was thinking ‘damn it would be nice if I could use KDE connect in automation setups’ 🙂
That said, I don’t agree with the reasoning for dropping old android versions. While I personally don’t think it’s reasonable to support android 4.x anymore, dropping support because of a google mandate is wrong, especially considering KDE Connect is a android app, not a Google Play app (Fdroid also exists). Also, I am guessing most people using KDE probably also use Fdroid or at least aren’t strangers to non-google-play app stores, so changing the entire app to cater to Google Play isn’t the greatest solution.
Just wanted to say my 2 cents, not that it actually matters too much. I think (hope) most people are using 5.x at LEAST.